Posted
by
Hemos
on Monday August 15, 2005 @11:35AM
from the talking-with-the-friends dept.

StromPetroke writes "On August 9th, online Linuxzine Mad Penguin conducted an interview with veteran Open Source advocate Bruce Perens on the DCC (Debian Common Core) Alliance. According to Bruce, the DCC will provide a way to "be able to certify to a Linux distribution, and then there will be multiple support providers who can support that same platform and who differentiate themselves at a higher level up the stack.""

Software is updated all the time.What you need are STANDARDS in the software development process. E.g. for any given releast in Vx.y [fixed x] the config/command line parameters should be backwards compatible, etc, etc, etc.

From this you can get a bit better stable moving target.

As it stands people are largely just using "Best judgement" which often works but you occasionally get the "Why the fuck did you do that you psyhco motherfuck!" reaction to having a configuration file move three times within 6 mont

Woah... Calm down for a second...Have you ever used Debian or a Debian based distribution? Config files - hell, any type of file - locations are standardized even if it means modifying the source of an app to change the default locations. Package versioning is standardized. Package renames are well handled. You can easily upgrade from version to version and still understand (for the most part) how the OS works and is laid out. Best of all, you can generally expect that your upgrade will actually work becaus

That's part of what the LSB is supposed to be about. Standardizing the ABI, and making sure that the distribution passes a test suite across the board. Even Debian is LSB-compliant....and if the LSB doesn't go far enough, I'm hopeful that a combination of the LSB and the DCCA will provide enough of a standard that compatibility and stability are assured.We also run into the fact that no distribution wants to be held to someone else's standards. It cramps their style and then they choose not to participa

I don't think Debian is LSB-certified. Also, location of configartion files has absolutely nothing to do with the standardization of the platform's ABI, what (as you mention) the LSB is all about. So LSB is not out to solve the aforementioned problem, AFAIK.Package: lsbPriority: extra
The intent of this package is to provide a best current practice way of installing and running LSB packages on Debian GNU/Linux. Its presence does not imply that we believe that Debian fully complies with the Linux Sta

However, most of those distros are binary compatable with Debian, with the exceptions of Xandros and Linspire, which take a bit of work. Yeah, even Ubuntu is compatable, if you can work out the library dependencies.

Well, they don't use the same apt mirror sites, and they charge for access to said mirrors. The former makes them nonstandard (of course, Ubuntu is the same way--they use their own mirrors too), and they are dirty in that they charge money for software that can be had for free by a simple download.

To me, this is clearly a step in the right direction. I have long been seing the rising number of debian-forks to be a problem for compability and a spreading of resources. In a DCCA world the high number of distributions would be an advantage, since each compliant distro can cater to a specific subset of users, while the community at large will still be able to cooperate cross-distro.The fact that Ubuntu (the distro currently on my desktop) is not a member of the DCCA does not bother me very much. The whol

Debian derivatives, taken together, have 3 times the market share of SuSe/Novell. Why not get them working together more effectively?

I'm working today on getting more Open Source into Department of Defense, and won't be able to participate any more in this thread. But I will read it all later, and you can always email me (bruce@perens.com). No phone calls today, but as always my number's on my web site.

with the way that some of these distros work. One of the things that really bugs me about the BSD variants is that they are "so stable", "so secure" that they are too out of date. And this is what happened with debian for me.

Not too long ago I was a Debian devotee. I wouldn't touch another distro. But my problem is that I am pretty busy, and if a problem occures, and you don't have the time to fix it, new problems just pop up and pretty soon cleaning up the mess seems too far out of reach.

Hmmm, this smells like UnitedLinux [unitedlinux.com] with a newer website. This time around it's the current second-fiddle linux distros, instead of the old ones.

The only marked difference seems to be that unitedlinux mentions 'servers'. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad idea, but for some reason UnitedLinux fizzled, with the last PR 2 years ago. So what's different this time?

One of the problem with UnitedLinux was that SCO was one of the major participants:-) . There was also the LCC, the ashes out of which this effort has sprung. But if you are counting, there are several other efforts begun by yours truly (or "helped-start" by the politically-correct edited interview) to get some of the same things done: Linux Standard Base, Progeny (for which I hired Ian), UserLinux. LCC includes a good deal of the planning of UserLinux, but I haven't given up on UserLinux yet (although eve